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Nancy Kwan recalls a fight that 'exploded' over underwear on The World of Suzie Wong set: 'All hell broke loose'

Famed actress Nancy Kwan opens up about a bitter conflict with her 'The World of Suzie Wong' director Richard Quine over undergarments that left her feeling 'vulnerable' in her new memoir.

After being encouraged into a spontaneous audition, and after months of waffling on the part of Paramount Pictures, Kwan was cast as the Hong Kong sex worker who falls into a whirlwind romance with an American architect played by William Holden. "The scene called for [Holden's] character, Robert Lomax, to angrily rip off my dress because he objected to Suzie's fussy Western attire, which she wore to prove her so-called sophistication," Kwan writes. Kwan says that many journalists she spoke to for the "massive" campaign to promote the film "insisted on attributing quotes to me that perpetuated xenophobic tropes of a Chinese person speaking English and bore no resemblance to the way I sounded."

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